Morning Bell

the minidisc

It is the one song from these sessions that arrived complete. Yorke told Select he wrote it with all the words more or less at once, which he said he had done with nothing else, and put it on MiniDisc. Then a lightning storm wiped the disc and he forgot the song entirely. Five months later, on a plane, awake for twenty-four hours and just dropping off, it came back to him.

It's very, very violent. Extremely violent.

thom yorke · select, december 2000

He added, in the same breath, that the words were less dramatic than they sounded, with one exception: the line about cutting the children in half, which he allowed was dramatic whichever way you took it.

the furniture

Critics have mostly heard a divorce in it. Marc Hogan at Vulture called its view of one Solomon-like, and The Guardian in 2020 filed it as the album's unorthodox breakup song. It reads like a house being divided, down to who keeps the furniture. Wikipedia's Kid A article uses it as the example of Yorke's method on the record, cutting phrases up and putting clichés and banal remarks side by side, so that an everyday question about where the car was parked sits next to the line about the children.

two recordings

Plenty of what they started in 1999 was abandoned halfway. Yorke told Mojo he would stop the tape, declare an idea rubbish and start something else, and months later they would play it back and wonder why they had stopped. He named this song as one it happened to. The take that became “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” was actually recorded before the one on Kid A.

The Kid A version runs in 5/4, over organ chords, bass and a steady drum pattern, and Yorke's voice is only lightly treated. Brent DiCrescenzo in Pitchfork heard pulsing organs and a stuttering snare, and Jonny Greenwood squeezing feedback out of his guitar like whale song. The last minute is where it falls apart: guitar screeching, effects piling up, Yorke going under. A piece of that last minute was used in one of the short “blips” that stood in for videos in 2000, over a black-and-white animation of a long-armed figure walking a snowy field.

again, on amnesiac

They put the older take on Amnesiac the following June as “Morning Bell/Amnesiac”. O'Brien said the band often recorded songs several ways and binned most of them, and this was the first time a second version had been strong enough to hear again. Yorke's reason was shorter.

like a recurring dream

thom yorke, quoted in the guardian, 23 january 2020

A live “Morning Bell” went on I Might Be Wrong, released on 12 November 2001. Twenty years later Kid A Mnesia added one more, “The Morning Bell (In the Dark Version)”, which lasts two minutes.

on stage

It went into the set at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000, nearly four months before the record came out, and stayed: 40 nights that year, 35 in 2001, 29 in 2003, 18 in 2006, 15 in 2008. On 24 January 2010, at the Oxfam benefit for Haiti at the Music Box in Hollywood, it came straight after “Kid A”. Then it went away for 2,622 days, until the American Airlines Arena in Miami on 30 March 2017. The last of its 161 nights is the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on 26 July 2018.

The Guardian put it 30th of the band's 40 best songs, asking readers to keep room for the original over the Amnesiac one. Hogan preferred the Amnesiac one and ranked the pair 31st together.